e day in mid-July she waved a farewell to Jack Junior, crowing in
his nurse's lap on the bank, paddled out past the first point to the
north, and pillowing her head on a cushioned thwart, gave herself up to
dreamy contemplation on the sky. There was scarce a ripple on the lake.
A faint breath of an offshore breeze fanned her, drifting the canoe at a
snail's pace out from land. Stella luxuriated in the quiet afternoon. A
party of campers cruising the lake had tarried at the bungalow till
after midnight. Jack Fyfe had risen at dawn to depart for some distant
logging point. Stella, once wakened, had risen and breakfasted with him.
She was tired, drowsy, content to lie there in pure physical
relaxation. Lying so, before she was aware of it, her eyes closed.

She wakened with a start at a cold touch of moisture on her face,--rain,
great pattering drops. Overhead an ominously black cloud hid the face of
the sun. The shore, when she looked, lay a mile and a half abeam. To the
north and between her and the land's rocky line was a darkening of the
lake's surface. Stella reached for her paddle. The black cloud let fall
long, gray streamers of rain. There was scarcely a stirring of the air,
but that did not deceive her. There was a growing chill, and there was
that broken line sweeping down the lake. Behind that was wind, a summer
gale, the black squall dreaded by the Siwashes.

She had to buck her way to shore through that. She drove hard on the
paddle. She was not afraid, but there rose in her a peculiar tensed-up
feeling. Ahead lay a ticklish bit of business. The sixteen-foot canoe
dwarfed to pitiful dimensions in the face of that snarling line of
wind-harried water. She could hear the distant murmur of it presently,
and gusty puffs of wind began to strike her.

Then it swept up to her, a ripple, a chop, and very close behind that
the short, steep, lake combers with a wind that blew off the tops as
each wave-head broke in white, bubbling froth. Immediately she began to
lose ground. She had expected that, and it did not alarm her. If she
could keep the canoe bow on, there was an even chance that the squall
would blow itself out in half an hour. But keeping the canoe bow on
proved a task for stout arms. The wind would catch all that forward
part which thrust clear as she topped a sea and twist it aside, tending
always to throw her broadside into the trough. Spray began to splash
aboard. The seas were so short and steep that the